Agency official urges CISA involvement in state cyber planning to protect emergency communications

An agency official urged early involvement by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in state cyber planning, saying the agency can help connect state and local partners to grants, technical guidance and cross-sector contacts needed to secure emergency communications and critical networks.

The official, speaking in a briefing, said many state and local agencies "don't really know" how to translate traditional IT practices into operational requirements for public-safety systems and that bringing CISA into planning would "bridge those gaps" and guide where grant dollars should be driven.

The official used public-safety communications as an example of why tailored planning matters: "Our downtime window for maintenance is very, very small where in our traditional IT environment, a maintenance window for them, maybe a span of eight hours. If we were to go to any of our first responders out there and even suggest that your technology solution is not going to be available for the potential span of eight hours, that is completely unacceptable," the official said.

Officials noted that emergency communications centers and alert-and-warning systems are high-priority cyber assets because outages directly affect public safety. The speaker said networks, infrastructure and relationships with communications owner-operators — and with energy providers that sustain communications systems — must be part of planning and grant decisions.

The speaker described the group's background in public-safety communications and Emergency Support Function 2 (ESF-2; communications lead role) and argued that experience with the state Communications Interoperability Plan (referred to in the transcript as "Skip") offers a model for a "whole community" strategic planning process that brings multiple jurisdictions and sectors to the table.

The official concluded that participation on planning committees early in the process helps ensure interoperability and consequence management are addressed before systems are deployed or funded, rather than being an afterthought during incident response. No formal actions or votes were announced during the briefing.